iWoz (12 page)

By the fourth night of trying to do this, Allen and I were working alone. Steve just didn't have the stamina to stay up and work all night. And by then we'd come up with another idea. Don't use the axle, but keep the wheels. We rigged up this little hookup on the building, higher than the sheet would be, and attached the fishing line and a couple of skates to it. We then tested it out. We stood on the roof, let go of the fishing line, and watched the little skates roll down their ramps until they pulled the sheet down so it scrolled down, pulling down the left side and the right side together. Left to right. It worked perfectly.

We almost got caught that night, by the way. We tried to test it again, but a janitor came along. We just ducked on that roof and were lying down as low as we could. I remember the janitor moving his flashlight around and the light landing on my hand. But before he could call anyone, we ran out of there like crazy.

A couple of days later was graduation day. I woke up that morning to the phone ringing. It was Steve calling from school with bad news. It turned out someone, probably another student, had cut the fishing line and pulled the sign down that morning. So Steve got in trouble—I guess the "SWAB JOB" gave it away, and we never got to play our prank.

Afterward I thought about this a lot. I finally came to the conclusion that even though our "Brazilian Best Wishes" sign didn't come off, it wasn't a failure. Some projects are worth the energy and worth spending a lot of time on, even if they don't come out perfectly.

I learned about teamwork and patience and hard work from that prank—and I learned never to brag about my pranks. Because I found out a year later that Steve Jobs had shown some of the students our prank, showing off. And the guy who told me

that—that Steve Jobs had shown him the sign—said he was the guy who cut it clown.

• o •

Steve and I were into listening to Bob Dylan and his lyrics, trying to figure out who was better, Dylan or the Beatles. We both favored Dylan because the songs were about life and living and values in life and what was really important. The Beatles mostly made these nice little happy songs—you know, nice-to-know- you, nice-to-be-with-you, nice-to-be-in-love-with-you songs. They were simple—even after albums like
Rubber Soul
came out. The songs the Beatles did were not as deep down and affecting your soul and emotions as Dylan's were. They were more like pop songs. To us, Dylan's songs struck a moral chord. They kind of made you think about what was right and wrong in the world, and how you're going to live and be.

At any rate, this first introduction we never forgot, and later on Steve and I were really linked. Linked forever.

Chapter 6
Phreaking for Real

In 1971, the day before I headed off to my third year of college at Berkeley, I was sitting at my mother's kitchen table and there happened to be a copy of
Esquire
sitting there. Even though I never usually read this magazine, for some reason I started flipping through it that day.

I came upon an article called "Secrets of the Little Blue Box." Those were interesting enough words to make me stop skimming and read that article all the way through.

Now, it was labeled as an "incredible story", and I had no idea what a Blue Box was until I started reading the article. But as soon as I did, it just grabbed me. Wow! You know how some articles just grab you from the first paragraph? Well, it was one of those articles, probably because this story was about tech people like me. Back then, there were never articles about tech people— really, never—so once I started reading this article, about people like me, I couldn't stop. It basically was a story about how a bunch of technical kids and young engineers around the country had figured out how to crack codes on the phone system. The article called them "phone phreaks." These people were able to figure out that by just whistling certain tones into a phone handset, they could make telephone calls within the Bell phone system for free.

Essentially, they first would dial an 800 or 555 number, any free exchange, then they would make this tone sound to seize the line. If this certain tone worked, they'd get a chirp that meant they were now in control of a piece of phone circuit equipment called a tandem. (A tandem just waits for special tones to direct calls throughout the phone system.) The phone phreak could then give the system the tones it needed to dial any seven- or ten-digit number just by making a bunch of certain sounds that were equal to the numbers on a phone from Ma Bell's perspective.

That sounded plausible in a way. I already had a basic idea about how the tone system worked on telephones. And the people in the article—in this "incredible story"—were claiming that by doing this, they were finding out things about the phone system no one knew about. I'm talking about things like its inherent bugs and holes and weaknesses and, of course, all the ways to take advantage of them. So, as I said, they were doing tilings by whistling tones into the phone lines, by tricking operators, by bouncing calls off satellites and back to other countries. They were doing all this stuff. And though it seemed an unbelievable story, I kept reading it over and over, and the more I read it, the more possible and real it sounded.

The other thing that intrigued me about the article was the fact that it described a whole web of people who were doing this: the phone phreaks. They were anonymous technical people who went by fake names and lived all over the place. Some were in the Northeast, some in the Southeast, some were in the West. Just all over. The story told a tale about some guys who drove out to Arizona, clamped a wire to a pay phone, and were somehow able to literally take over the whole country's phone networks. It said they were able to set themselves up into ten-way conference calls.

The characters sounded just too perfectly described not to be true. I remember how it spoke about some blind kids who just

wanted someone to talk to. Somehow they'd gotten the phone company people to tell them some of the secrets of the phone company and were using them to talk to each other. That made sense to me, too.

The article also talked about the ethics these guys supposedly had. That it wasn't just about free calls. One of the guys said he was basically trying to do a good thing by finding flaws in the system and letting the phone company know what they were. That appealed to me.

The article also talked about one of the secrets these guys had discovered. Well, I already knew this secret, so I guess it was kind of a rediscovery. I'm talking about the technique of taking any phone—you can do it with any phone to this day—and tapping out phone numbers with the hook switch. What I mean is the actual switch on the phone that tells the phone company if the phone is on or off the hook. What you do is pick up the phone. You hear a dial tone, right? Then if you click that hook switch once, it's like dialing a "1." Click it twice really quickly and that is the same as dialing a "2." Clicking it ten times in a row would be the same as dialing a "0." (The reason this works goes back to the old days of rotary phones when you dialed a "5," and the dial would swing back five times—click click click click click.) And like I said, the system still works like that to this day. Try it.

But this was a trick only a very few people knew back then. So I could tell that the characters being described were really tech people, much like me, people who liked to design things just to see what was possible, and for no other reason, really. And because I knew the hook switch thing, too, I immediately got intrigued.

• o •

In the
Esquire
article, there was a phone phreak named Joe. He was blind. According to the article, he'd discovered this cool thing: that if you play a really high E—two octaves above the high E on the guitar, for example, which is 2,600 hertz (Hz) exactly—it was the exact tone that seized the tandem and gave you control of the phone system. It probably still works to this day, and you can tiy that, too. Anyway, Joe was able to actually make this whistle sound with his mouth!

Now, Joe had perfect pitch—probably because he was blind, I don't know. His first whistle seized the line, and then he could make a bunch of short whistles to dial numbers. I couldn't believe this was possible, but there it was and, wow, it just made my imagination run wild. Because just by whistling this high E, he could from there dial a long-distance call that would then be free. To the phone company, it would look like a free 800 or 555 long-distance phone call. And he was doing it all with his mouth!

The
Esquire
article also described someone who went by the name of Captain Crunch, after the cereal (Cap'n Crunch), which used to have a whistle toy in it. Captain Crunch used the whistle and discovered the same thing the blind phone phreak did: that if you plugged the right hole in the whistle and hit that high E, that 2,600 Hz sound—it blew just the right note that basically seized the phone line for anything you wanted to do.

To make a call after seizing the line, Captain Crunch used a device the article called a "Blue Box." It put pairs of tones into the phone, similar to the way touch-tone phones work. This method worked everywhere on the multifrequency (MF) system in the United States, where Joe's and the cereal box's whistle only worked in a few places with old single-frequency equipment.

In the stoiy, the guy who built the Blue Box supposedly stole or had loaned to him a standard phone company manual that listed all the frequencies he would need to build it. The article said the phone company figured it out and started to withdraw all those manuals from every library in the country. They made it secret, in other words. They wouldn't let it out anymore. But you know what? The secret was already out. Way out. Too late for the phone company, or so the article said.

This idea of the Blue Box just amazed me. With it, you could just hook into some 800 number and use that line to make one call after another, all over the world. It didn't plug into the handset or anything. It was very simple. You just put its speaker up to the mouthpiece of the phone. Although it was incredibly easy, only something like a thousand people in the country, technical people like me, could ever have figured it out and used it.

• o •

One of the first things I did after reading the article was to call up my friend Steve Jobs. He was just about to start twelfth grade at Homestead High School, the same high school I'd gone to. I started telling him about this amazing article, and how it made sense, really made sense, in a technical way. I told him that, according to the story, the whole system was grabbable. Attackable. And I told him how these smart engineers portrayed in the story overtook and used it. They apparently knew more about the phone system than even the phone company's engineers. If the article was right, and I thought it could be, that meant all the secrets of the phone company were out. It meant people like us were starting to create little networks in order to exploit them.

This was just the most exciting thing for us two young guys to be talking about. I was twenty; Steve was probably about seventeen at the time.

And while I was on the phone with Steve that afternoon, I remember I just stopped mid-sentence and remarked, "Wait, Steve, this article is just too true. They put in real frequencies like 700 Hz and 900 Hz. They even gave the way to dial a '1a and a 3.' And they even gave the codes for dialing a call all the way to England."

Steve and I came up with a plan to give it a shot.

• o •

An hour later I picked Steve up and we drove down to SLAC, which is pronounced "slack" and is short for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. It had a great technical library, just tremendous. It had the kinds of technical books and computer books and magazines you wouldn't encounter in normal libraries or any other place I knew. If there was any place that had a phone manual that listed tone frequencies—the manual the phone company was trying to pull out of circulation—this would be it.

Anyway, I snuck into this library on many Sundays during my high school and early college computer design days. I never felt like it was sneaking, exactly, because they always left the doors open. In my experience, I've found that smart people often leave doors open. Maybe it's because they have other things on their minds.

So Steve Jobs and I snuck in that day, that Sunday in 1971, and started searching for books with telephone information. Like I said, that
Esquire
article gave tons of details, not only on how tones are used to dial numbers, but also on how the tones were in pairs. For instance, it said that the 700 Hz and 900 Hz tones together stood for a "1," that 700 Hz and 1,100 Hz meant a "2," that 700 Hz and 1,300 Hz together meant "3," and so on. There was even more detail than this, details I figured we could check right there at the SLAC library. So Steve and I sat in there looking for confirmation that this Blue Box thing was for real—we wanted the complete list of tones that could theoretically make all the digits. Because that would mean we could build one.

We were individually flipping through various books and I had a blue one in my hand, maybe two inches thick, with some phone system reference like the CCITT Handbook. In case you're wondering, CCITT is a long-forgotten acronym that stands for the Comite Consultatif International de Tele-graphique et Telephonique. It's the French name for an international standards-setting group for telegraph and, later, telephone systems.

I was flipping around and suddenly stopped on a page. There it was: a complete frequency list for MF (multifrequency) telephone switching equipment.